If the Shoe Fits

“Who is the first hero every little girl learns about?” Stuart Weitzman said the other day. If you guessed Cinderella, you are almost correct. “It’s a pair of shoes,” Weitzman went on. “A twenty-year-old girl can’t tell you a fairy tale she knew before ‘Cinderella,’ and the hero of ‘Cinderella’ is the shoe. Before she’s five years old, we’ve got her brainwashed.”

In the sense that the villain of “Othello” is the handkerchief, he’s not wrong. What is Cinderella if not the ultimate aspirational consumer? Weitzman, who took over his father’s shoe business in 1965, knows the type: in 1971, he introduced a Cinderella-inspired transparent pump called the Exposé, which sold at Saks and Neiman Marcus. So when the upcoming Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” needed someone to design the glass slippers, the producers turned to him.

This isn’t the first time that Weitzman has played fairy godmother. In 2002, the actress Laura Harring (“Mulholland Drive”) wore his “million-dollar shoes”—platinum sandals encrusted with four hundred and sixty-four diamonds, requiring three bodyguards—to the Academy Awards. (A five-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar version, the Millionairess, has been sold at Weitzman’s boutiques.) He has since made Oscar super-shoes for Alison Krauss (jewelled stilettos featuring a five-carat amaretto diamond), and Kathleen (Bird) York (copper d’Orsay pumps festooned with earrings that had belonged to Rita Hayworth). Last summer, he custom-colored a pair of blue cork wedges for no less a Cinderella figure than Kate Middleton, who wore them for nine days during the London Olympics. “It was the darnedest thing,” Weitzman said.

Still, not every pumpkin is meant to become a coach. In 2008, the screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) ditched Weitzman’s million-dollar T-straps days before the Oscars, claiming she’d been snared in a publicity stunt. (“I honestly thought they were just sparkly shoes,” she wrote on MySpace.) In the Grimm brothers’ version of “Cinderella,” the evil stepsisters cut off a toe and a heel, respectively, to fit into the slipper. The prince rides off with each stepsister, only to turn back when he sees the shoe filling up with blood. Weitzman hadn’t heard that part, but was reminded of the recent fad for “stiletto surgery,” in which women have their pinkie toes removed so that they can fit into pointier heels. “Generally, the younger the girl the more she will suffer for the look,” he said.

Weitzman was at a Union Square rehearsal studio for a fitting with Laura Osnes, the actress playing Cinderella. In designing the glass slippers—actually, they’re polyvinyl-chloride pumps—he was given a few guidelines. They had to be easy for Osnes to walk and waltz in (he went with a two-and-a-half-inch heel). And they had to be visible from the audience, “because, if you make a transparent shoe and you’re in Row M, you see a girl dancing with a naked foot, basically.”

His solution: bedazzle each shoe with five thousand Swarovski crystals. In collaboration with the show’s costume designer, William Ivey Long, he chose a type of metal-coated gem called the Aurora Borealis, which picks up light in shimmering purples and greens, “like a disco ball.” The shoes also had to match the ball gown. “We’ve invented a world, and then she has to stand out in that world,” Long said. “The shoes are just the most important part of that, of course.”

“I think the girl is,” Weitzman said.

He opened a violet shoebox and took out prototypes, which were studded with stand-in crystals. (The final pair, worth about three grand, will be assembled at Weitzman’s factory, in Spain; the bejewelling process takes three days.) The transparent heel had been attached by means of a patented procedure that doesn’t require nails, and there were small breathing holes along the bottom, to prevent the shoes from steaming up like ski goggles.

Osnes, a size 7, took off her boots (black faux leather with buckle accents, from Designer Shoe Warehouse) and slipped on the prototypes: a perfect fit.

Weitzman squinted. Osnes’s toes had too much wiggle room. “The next shoe will be adjusted so that it’s short, like her toes,” he said. He admired her purple toenails: “You have nice feet.”

Osnes laughed and swivelled her ankle: “I should have had it written into my contract—pedicures!” ♦

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